This provision hinders the Executive's ability to carry out its military, national security, and foreign relations activities and would, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles. The executive branch must have the flexibility to act swiftly in conducting negotiations with foreign countries regarding the circumstances of detainee transfers. The Congress designed these sections, and has here renewed them once more, in order to foreclose my ability to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. [More...]

I continue to believe that operating the facility weakens our national security by wasting resources, damaging our relationships with key allies, and strengthening our enemies. My Administration will interpret these provisions as consistent with existing and future determinations by the agencies of the Executive responsible for detainee transfers. And, in the event that these statutory restrictions operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my Administration will implement them in a manner that avoids the constitutional conflict.

On the prohibition of transfer to the U.S. for federal trial:

“My administration will interpret these provisions as consistent with existing and future determinations by the agencies of the executive responsible for detainee transfers,” Obama said. “In the event that these statutory restrictions operate in a manner that violates constitutional separation of powers principles, my administration will implement them in a manner that avoids the constitutional conflict.”

The bill extended and strengthened limits on transfers out of Guantánamo to troubled nations like Yemen, the home country of the bulk of the remaining low-level detainees who have been cleared for repatriation. It also, for the first time, limited the Pentagon’s ability to transfer the roughly 50 non-Afghan citizens being held at the Parwan prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan at a time when the future of American detention operations there is murky.

Obama signed the bill into law Wednesday.

The cost of Gitmo is enormous. There are 166 remaining detainees at Gitmo. The Miami Herald reports:

1,700 troops and civilians serve on temporary or contract duties — in a setting where the Pentagon imports everything from food to fuel for electricity to entertainment for both captives and captors.

...The Obama administration has estimated the costs of keeping a captive at Guantánamo as topping $800,000 per prisoner per year. A Government Accountability Office study on the possibility of relocating Guantanamo captives to U.S. soil estimated the cost of one year’s federal confinement in a maximum security lockup at $34,627.55 a year.

DOJ has cleared 55 detainees for release, mostly Yemenis and Syrians, but they can't leave because of the Congress' restrictions.

...straight to the American people, like he could with any number of supposed major disagreements with the insane Right (he did just win re-election, no?) In fact, that would seem to be the better route, since the Right has no interest in doing anything to help anyone, not even themselves. So...you go around them, over their heads, you blow right past them, and you beat them at a game of YOUR choosing, of YOUR design. But that requires imagination and creativity, and, sigh, you know the rest. Plus, from his actions, Obama can't really be viewed as believing this stuff too much. When we murder innocent folks by drone, for example, our enemies are just as "strengthened," if not more so.

I'm sure we will soon hear from some people that the fact that the president signed the new National Defense Authorization Act today, despite a previous promise to veto the measure if provisions that prevented him from closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay were included, because he has a "long game" strategy designed to "put the Republicans in a corner." He also endorsed, by his signature, the principle embodied in the act that Americans can be detained indefinitely without probable cause on the suspicion of "supporting" terrorism which, of course, will mean whatever the executive department or the Commander In Chief -- Trumpets, please -- decide that it means.

[snip]

Yes, Congress has partly tied his hands, and it has done so by making it harder for him to close Gitmo down. But, even against that, the president argues for the supremacy of the executive branch in such matters. That, coupled with a veto warning that was as empty as a toddler's threat to run away from home, vitiates any case the president might choose to make that what he really wants to do is to protect the Bill Of Rights. The presidency has been allowed to become a dangerous beast over a number of decades, to the point where anyone who seeks it can rightly be presumed to have at least the spark of lawless authoritarianism in him. And, if that spark is there, the presidency will seek it out and bring it to flame. This president is no different.

[snip]

This is what you get when you don't listen to old Ike's warning, when you let the Kennedys run amuck concerning Castro, when you let Lyndon fake an incident in the Tonkin Gulf, when you impeach Nixon over a burglary and not the illegal bombing of Cambodia, when you let everyone skate on Iran-Contra, when you impeach one president over a blowjob but let another one slide for lying the country into a war, for abrogating treaties and violating international law regarding torture, when you let a sociopath like Richard Cheney anywhere near the levers of power, and when you let a president decide which American lives or dies by standards he declines to share with the rest of us. This is what you get. Barack Obama didn't sell out the Bill Of Rights today because he's Barack Obama. Barack Obama sold out the Bill Of Rights today because he's the president of the United States, and that's now part of the damn job description.

All I can say is, it's long past time we stopped thinking that "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" means what we thought it did.

a web page w/a post about the President "selling out" on the Bill of Rights is itself preceeded by multiple pages of bot-loading tracking code - or am I the only one who gets the 10-second please wait while the page loads message?

When we murder innocent folks by drone, for example, our enemies are just as "strengthened," if not more so.

is there a moral difference, between "collateral damage by unmanned drone", vs "collateral damage by ground troops, artillery, ship-to-shore fire, manned bombers/fighters, or infantry/seal teams? last i checked, dead is, well, dead, regardless of you come to be that way.

this whole "killing civilians by accident, by unmanned drones, is immoral" argument strikes me as ludicrous, at best. wars are not fought by the marquess of queensbury rules, and never have been. to argue that killing your enemy, by unmanned drone, with the same (or more or less, i don't know) probability of accidentally killing unarmed civilians, is somehow less moral than killing them by other means, strikes me, and always has as, sophomoric.

the real issue is, should we be killing anyone, absent either: a. a declared war, by congress., or b. due process.? how we go about killing them is kind of irrelevant.

but that is not always the case.
Al-Aulaqi's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, did not receive any warning.
He was killed while having lunch by the roadside.
All Obama had to say, via his rep, was that the 16 year old should have picked a different father - you know, the guy they killed two weeks earlier.

So, this 16 year old ("targeted object") apparently did not receive the appropriate admonition, which would have been to go to the moon.

I do not like what our government has become.
Too much like Nazis for my taste.

declared war by Congress was World War II. Which means that all the so-called "wars" from Korea onward, were not formally, Constitutionally actual "wars."
Of course, that does not mean that a whole lot of people were not killed.
And forget about due process, and the illegality of extra-judicial killings. I agree that we should not be doing any of this, cpinva. But we seem to have lost that argument long ago. Unfortunately. :-(

The signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 Wednesday puts paid to the predictions by the administration's liberal and pseudo-left supporters that Obama, freed of re-election concerns, would pursue a more "progressive" political course in his second term. As in 2012, this legislation enshrines a sweeping assault on core constitutional principles and democratic rights.

The legislation's provisions underscore the link between the eruption of American militarism abroad and the lurch toward police-state measures at home.